We CAN'T do this
The view from my classroom. Yes, life was good.
So yeah, I went to one of those "liberal New England colleges" that connote images of foliage and cute boys in tartan plaid scarves...but most of the 250 kids on my campus were sporting threads from the "free box" or swimming naked off the pier during lunch break. College of the Atlantic is not like other schools...at all. It's more of an experiment in what happens when you mix education with extreme environmentalism. Recycling, composting, making fuel from veggie oil, eating local food, building sustainable structures -- it's all old news for them. For almost 40 years they've been practicing and preaching so much of what's encompassed by the year's biggest buzzword -- "green."
Plenty (It's easy being green!) Magazine just profiled my alma mater, and as I was scrolling through the article online, up came an advertisement for Pacific Gas & Electric. "We can do this" it read, with a cute little wind turbine graphic.
What business -- I ask you, I deeply ask you -- does a Northern California utility company that gets most of its energy from burning fossil fuels and nuclear power have advertising in a New York-based magazine profiling a miniscule hippie school in downeast Maine?
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Comments (3)
whoa, cool surprise. Good old Bar Harbor. I've swum naked off that pier, but damn damn cold.
Posted by Larry L | December 12, 2007 04:54 PM
Amanda:
Perhaps the electric utility business is finally wising up - it needs to tell its story just like other businesses. Imagine what life in a city would be like if it were not for electric power. For the residents of the city, electricity helps to keep the environment clean and smoke free compared to the chimneys and smokestacks that predominated in the early part of the 20th century.
The dark secret behind 49% of the electricity used in the US is that it is created by burning dirty coal, normally "somewhere else" where the air is a bit less clean or where the smokestack is tall enough to take the smoke far away.
The good news is that 20% of the electricity in the US is already being generated by the only really new power source of the 20th century - one that is clean enough to operate inside a sealed submarine.
That source - nuclear power - is clean enough for hippies to get behind, but many seem to think there is something so frightening that it must be avoided. One new friend of mine - who legitimately claims to be part of one of the last hippie couples on Long Island - spent a decade in a gradual discovery of the deep story about nuclear power. The result of that effort is a new book published at the end of October 2007 by Knopf titled Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.
It is a mind opening read. Highly recommended.
Posted by Rod Adams | December 12, 2007 10:58 PM
Rod,
Yeah, that book's on my night table right now, actually. I'm looking forward to cracking the spine. I'm still deeply skeptical that nuclear is what we should be deploying first. It seems prohibitively expensive, still relies quite significantly on other resources (uranium for the fuel, water and lots of it to cool the reaction), and we still don't have an adequate garbage disposal for the waste. At the same time, it feeds into the ongoing conflicts we're having overseas. How much more powerful would George W. Bush's argument be if he could push a nuclear-free alternative energy on Iran and use his own country as an example? When every roof is clad in solar panels and every wind tunnel outfitted with turbines then we will see what kind of slack we need to make up with the other options.
Larry -- yes, the water is so cold. So good for you, though. I made a point to jump off the pier every month of my junior and senior years. (Yes, January, February, March too.) I think it kept me sane.
Posted by Amanda | December 12, 2007 11:49 PM